The Training Ground by Martin Dugard

rattler coiled in his bedroll. Thick black clouds of flies covered the tents and food, swarming into men’s mouths as they tried to sleep or eat. And a predatory militia of camp followers had wandered down from Louisiana to take advantage of the soldiers. This band of pimps, whores, gamblers, and desperadoes was described by one soldier as “all the cutthroats, thieves and murderers of the United States and Texas.” Corpus Christi had been a quiet and desolate smugglers’ outpost before Taylor’s Army of Occupation arrived. In less than a year it had become a haven for gambling, prostitution, and loan-sharking — the last a result of the U.S. Army’s inability to pay the soldiers for months at a time.
    Grant wasn’t a complainer, but if he were, his letters to Julia during the winter months could have gone on and on about the harsh northerly winds, the punishing rain and thunderstorms, and the unprotected coastal plain where there wasn’t so much as a tree to block gales ripping in off the Gulf. The army’s Quartermaster Corps, unaccustomed to providing for the needs of a wartime force, had disbursed flimsy, floorless tents; as a result, Grant and the rest of the four-thousand-man force slept in the cold mud, protected from the elements by thin woolen blankets. Fevers and diarrhea became so common that one-sixth of the American contingent was on sick call at any given time.
    Instead of griping, Grant wrote love letter after love letter to Julia, rambling on and on about wanting to resign his commission just so he could be with her — and during the long, miserable winter he came very close to doing just that. But by March, when the rains had ended and conditions were finally right for the Army of Occupation to mobilize, he knew that such an act would have been perceived as cowardice and an abandonment of his West Point brethren. The cold, hard facts were this: in order to see Julia again, he might need to fight the Mexicans. There was no way of escaping back into her arms until the conflict was ended. “Fight or no fight, everyone rejoices at the idea of leaving Corpus Christi,” he wrote to Julia. Others may have been heading south dreaming of glory; Grant headed south to get back to Saint Louis.
    In all, nearly thirty-five hundred U.S. troops were marching to face a Mexican army that would soon number more than twice that size. They had come to Corpus Christi from posts great and small all around America (frontier outposts were often manned by a single company numbering just fifty-five men). Not only was their winter drilling under Taylor a crash course in how to function as a large armed force, but it also marked the first time in three decades that the bulk of the U.S. Army was in the same place at the same time.
    To avoid ambush during the march to Mexico, General Taylor divided his army into four columns, each leaving a day apart. The first column had left on March 8. The cavalry, in the form of Colonel David Twiggs’s Second Dragoons, led the way alongside a company of horse-drawn light artillery. Two more brigades of infantry and artillery trailed in their dusty wake. Grant and the Fourth Infantry were the final elements of Taylor’s enormous caravan. On March 11, they struck their tents and gathered in formation on the sands of Corpus Christi, preparing to cross the Nueces River and venture into the no-man’s-land buffering the American and Mexican armies.
    The Fourth was commanded by Colonel William Whistler, an aging alcoholic who had alternately served with distinction and gotten so thoroughly inebriated that he’d been threatened with dismissal from the service. His time in uniform had begun during the presidency of John Adams and continued through America’s expansion. Whistler, who had first been commissioned in 1801, was taken prisoner by the British during the War of 1812, for many years withstood hardship and prolonged separation from loved ones as a fort commander on the turbulent American